All-Time Top 20 Favorite Movies, #6: You call this archaeology?

When I was making up this list, I thought about this one longer than any other choice, and eventually it came down to this: I considered, “between Raiders and Last Crusade, if I could only watch one of these movies for the rest of my life, which would it be?”

On that score it was a pretty easy choice to make.

Yeah, Raiders is probably the better movie. Like 96% probably. Raiders is the more important movie. Raiders is, and we’re getting into some shaky territory here, probably the more “adult” movie.

I like Last Crusade more.

I have seen Last Crusade, and this is not an exaggeration here, hundreds of times. Literally hundreds. When I was a kid, my sister and I watched it a couple times a week for a year or two straight. Watching it a few days ago for this – more than 20 years and hundreds of viewings since the first time – I still caught something in it I’d never noticed before. Three things, actually. I have spent, by a crude approximation, three weeks of my life watching this movie. And I still found something new in it.

I love Raiders of the Lost Ark, and thankfully I do not have to make actual decisions on which one of these two films I will watch exclusively until the end of time (inasmuch as I still plan to live forever), but Last Crusade evokes a childlike glee in me that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.

What did I find, you ask? Three things, before I stopped writing them down, at least.

One, and this is surprisingly boneheaded of me to have missed all these years, is the cup/grail imagery during the introductory scene with Indy and Donovan. There’s one bit where Indy is talking about the legend and the camera just randomly cuts to Donovan pouring champagne into tall, fluted glasses. It is, to say the least, not particularly subtle. I don’t know how I’ve missed it.

Two, while I was watching that entire conversation I thought that it was, all things considered, about as enjoyable an exposition dump as you can possibly get in a movie. But then it ends when Donovan says, “your father is the man who’s disappeared.” And I’m like, wait a fucking minute, why didn’t you LEAD with that? Instead of five minutes of grail lore wankery, maybe you should have entered the room with, “Dr. Jones, I’m sorry to inform you that your father has disappeared. Let me explain how.”

Yes, I realize that isn’t necessarily as interesting a movie scene, but still. As a dramatic turning point it’s kind of a dick move.

Third, in the first Red Line Scene – aka The Best Parts of Any Indy Movie – we are given an overlaid montage of Indy reading and studying his father’s diary. If you look closely at the background images, which I understand is difficult when you are captivated by the Red Line, you can see that basically the entire movie is foreshadowed there. The library, the canyon, the temple, the whole bit. The whole movie. None of which Indy ever recognizes when he comes across them. When his father tells him that they have to go to Berlin to get the diary, Indy has no idea why, even though he spent an entire transatlantic flight at 1938 speeds studying the damn thing.

I thought, why not just have him read Sports Illustrated?

I talked at length on the Indy episode of the podcast about why this movie is so great, so I don’t think I need to go into too much detail here. It ticks all the boxes, to say the least. Motivated characters? Duh. Loving attention paid to supporting cast? “That car belonged to my brother in law.” Great script? “That car belonged to my brother in law.”

Admittedly it’s a “do more with more” sort of movie than do less with more, but look what that gets you! While some might argue that there are movies that have better individual action scenes than Last Crusade – those people would be wrong, but the argument exists – there is not a movie that has a COLLECTION of action sequences as exceptional as this one. The circus train. Venice. The motorcycle chase. The airplane. A lesser movie would use one of these scenes as a grand finale. This one leaves them laying around like flip flops on the back porch. THIS movie’s signature set piece is the tank chase that for my money is still the greatest single action scene ever filmed. Seriously. If you haven’t watched it in a while, go check it out. It will blow your mind. (I highly recommend the new Blu-Ray set, which has picture quality that will make you weep.)

Really, though, a big reason I love this movie is because Indiana Jones is a foundational figure in what we’ll call for the sake of discussion my somewhat unique psychopathology. I grew up with movies, and books, and stories. I’ve mentioned it here before – I read a lot and have since I was able to read at an age I will not reveal since most people wouldn’t believe it anyway. I was a weird, socially-anxious, introverted kid who preferred reading to going outside, and I stayed that way until basically… <checks calendar> eight seconds ago.

So I read books. And though my father, as we have repeatedly said, had no idea what constituted age-appropriate movies he and my mother were, for reasons that have never been successfully explained to me, extraordinarily strict about what I was allowed to watch on television. The Terminator when it first came out on VHS? Just fine. (I was seven.) Alf? Not so much. Literally, until I was about 12 years old, the only things I was allowed to watch on TV were sports and Star Trek.

Sports.

And Star Trek.

I’ll pause for a moment to let THAT sink in.

I read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies. A LOT of books and a LOT of movies. I was the youngest person ever to get an adult library card at Northeast Regional (I was, again, seven.) My dad had memberships at every video store within 5 miles of here – which 25 years ago was about a hundred – and blew through tapes like nobody’s business.

Then at 11 I got started in the theatre and any hope of me being a normal person went up in smoke.

I am, at a very basic level, not really equipped to deal with… you know… life. So literature, books, movies, plays, however you want to slice it, became the way I processed a world I didn’t (and for the most part still don’t) understand. And being a brainy, introverted kid (and adult) I gravitated toward brainy, introverted characters who would come out of their shell now and then and do amazing things: Jean-Luc Picard. John Crichton. The Doctor.*

And Indiana Jones; above all of them, Indiana Jones: a shy, withdrawn college professor who turns into a superhero and saves the world when he puts on a hat.